Torture Comes Home

Ice is using CIA torture techniques against detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, and possibly other immigration detention centers.

We are not talking about water boarding, (yet), but rather locking people in tiny boxes for hours on end.

One of the most horrific torture methods that the CIA employed in its post-9/11 incommunicado "black site" torture chambers was the Confinement Box.

Not many detainees in CIA custody experienced the Box. The most prominent of them is the man known as Abu Zubaydah, the first CIA detainee post-9/11 and someone the agency used as a guinea pig for all who came into their custody later. What follows is not pleasant reading.

For 20 days in August of 2002, after the Justice Department approved a proposed CIA menu of torture including something it called "cramped confinement," Abu Zubaydah was subjected to what the Senate intelligence committee's 2014 inquiry called "enhanced interrogation techniques on a near 24-hour-per-day basis." While the intensive waterboarding the CIA visited upon Abu Zubaydah has forevermore defined whatever passes for the popular understanding of his torture, the waterboarding was by no means the limit of what the CIA did to him.

On his first day of the August torture, after agency torturers slammed Abu Zubaydah's head against a concrete wall, they removed his hood "and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor." A CIA cable records that they placed the box on the floor of the interrogation room "so as to appear [to be] a coffin." No one can misinterpret that message. But because the CIA was interested in driving the point home, its personnel at the Thailand black site known as Catseye or Detention Site Green "told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box."

A CIA medical officer—don't be fooled by the title into thinking they were there to help the detainees—cabled that Abu Zubaydah's liturgy of torture "progress[ed] quickly to the water board after large box, walling and small box periods." ("Walling" is using a rolled-up towel, positioned behind someone's neck and held on either side by someone in front of them, to slam someone's head into a wall.) The large box was the coffin. According to the Senate report, during those twenty days, "Abu Zubaydah spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet."

………

I say all this because the following description appears in an Amnesty International report released Friday into the conditions of confinement for migrants at Alligator Alcatraz:
The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty.

………

Here we have Florida jailers using CIA-pedigreed torture techniques on migrants accused of being in the country without proper authorization, a civil, not criminal, violation. I have many questions about whose idea it was to import the confinement box to Alligator Alcatraz. But in the absence of answers to them at present, I submit to you that its appearance here, structurally speaking, is the direct result of there being no criminal or even substantial political penalties for the architects of the torture program, either at Langley or within the Bush administration. When there is no consequence for torture, torture will persist, going into abeyance—at most—until politically empowered sadists reach for a tool of domination. The lack of consequence ensures it is a matter of time before people who owe their positions of authority to declarations that they seek to dehumanize the vulnerable play a sick game of Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…

(emphasis original)

Every last one of these motherfuckers need to spend the rest of their lives in a 2 foot by 2 fit box.